"Mary MacKillop's canonisation tomorrow should be celebrated by believers and non-believers alike."
Sat, 16. October 2010
Sainthood Circus
That's what the editorials in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age are telling us. Coming from Australia's two most respected newspapers, that is just astonishing.
I can think of only one really good reason for non-believers to "celebrate" this person. She stood up to the Catholic hierarchy and exposed the priesthood for it's centuries-old secret culture of child molesting that is still endemic today. Well done for that. They turned a deaf ear to child-molesting revelations then (and they still do) but they have now hypocritically turned her into a legend - and that is just what they need to help them gloss over the dark side that is doggedly following them.
I do not quibble with people who say McKillop was a great Australian. Perhaps she was - but so was Dame Nellie Melba and so were many others. What I do question is the fundamental basis that underscores this Sainthood Circus. That is, the astonishing claims that McKillop, dead for over a century, supernaturally intervened in the medical treatment of two women. Rome apparently investigated the claims that she did so and no doubt it was an exhaustive process - but they have never published (and probably never will publish) a formal scientific/medical report which clearly documents how they reached the conclusion that the recovery of these two women from terminal disease was a result of direct intervention of a dead woman. The details that have been released are simply anecdotal, sketchy and unconvincing. How can millions of lay people be caught up in such an almighty stampede to accept an astonishing conclusion, without asking the hard questions first?
We may never know the medical reasons for some people going into remission but even if these two lucky jackpot winners from NSW did pray to a photograph of McKillop, it is NOT, repeat NOT, evidence of a divine miracle. Consider this. Billions of prayers are probably offered annually by Australians desperate for their god to help them with this, that or the other. The meagre success rate of only two in umpteen billion is compelling evidence that divine intervention is statistically non-existent.
The first of the two ladies was Veronica Hopson, who (according to an SMH article), was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukaemia and told ''death was the evident outcome''. She went home to die on 17th November, 1961. A month later she was back in hospital, sicker than before and with excruciating abscesses in her left arm and right thigh. "It was her complete recovery, without scientific explanation, combined with the prayers of Catholic sisters through MacKillop that prompted the Vatican to accept Mrs Hopson's cure was a ''miracle'' - the reason for MacKillop's beatification in 1995." says the Herald article.
The second was Kathleen Evans, who was diagnosed with inoperable lung and brain cancer in 1993 and given just months to live. According to the Daily Telegraph, "she carried with her a relic of Mary MacKillop and prayed intently - and 10 months later was cured".
That's about the sum of the public information about these two "miracles" and it's the same old story:-
Evidence: two women recovered after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Supporting Evidence: they both prayed to McKillop and the doctors were surprised at their recoveries.
Conclusion: McKillop did it, with a little help from an old relic.
I give this guarantee: If, after my death, I find myself vested with the magical power to cure cancer in the living, I will not wait for people to pray to me before acting. I will immediately use my new-found powers to find for myself and set about healing people as fast as I bloody well can - and I will do it at a much faster rate than two people every one hundred years. That's a promise.
See my astronomy images on my website: http://home.exetel.com.au/greybeard/Index.htm